On 5/4/2012 3:55 AM, Martin Kelly wrote: > On an expansion of before. Just like BSD and Linux are relatives of > each other and just as capable of each other, why shouldn't DOS be > able to be just as capable as its relative Windows? > > The DOS limitations are the limitations of old technology which are no > longer current limitations. This means that DOS like BSD in the 1980's > wouldn't be exactly the same as the BSD now. In fact if a recall > correctly BSD was far more closely related to System V than it is now. >
Analogies are a slippery slope. By many definitions, DOS is not even an operating system. It is a device driver, file system, and rudimentary memory manager that stays resident while a user program is running. When the user program stops a simple command shell replaces it. BSD comes from something that is more substantial in nature - Unix. Linux might not be Unix, but it was heavily influenced by it and has all of the same major design points and attributes. The bad analogy to use here would be that Unix and the variants endure because the foundation of the building was good. In comparison, DOS is the hut out in the woods - primitive and good at the time when you needed shelter, but it was never designed to compete with full operating systems that do multitasking, demand paging for memory management, decent network stack hooks, device driver/module support, etc. Windows is not a relative of DOS. Even something primitive like Win 31 or Win 95 basically looks at DOS like a boot loader. They are not in the same league. Here is the crux of my argument - if you need modern hardware support and modern features, you probably should use something that is current and maintained. It is not feasible to "grow" DOS to do all of these other things; what would be left would be something that barely runs any DOS applications and doesn't do all of the new stuff well either. There is not enough demand or qualified people with free time. Want to keep DOS relevant? We need applications ... today. (Different topic: In an earlier note you misinterpreted me. I said you could re-implement DOS with the int 21 interface easily, and some well behaved code might even run. But if you don't have the direct access to all of the hardware, TSRs, device drivers, segmented memory tricks, etc., it's not really DOS anymore - it would run so few applications.) Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
